I want to see more things happening in QuasiSpace.

What I did was run the installer, telling it to put the game on my USB key, copying the data from my current install. Then I but a batch file on the thumbdrive telling it to run the game with the appropriate parameters ( --configdir=.\ )

Imageshack gives you 1.5MB. If it's a lot bigger than that, then use Rapidshare.

Black Spathi Squadron.


How's this for a new planet type? Inhabited World. Replace all the planets you can go to to talk to somebody with this. Basically you just take whatever the planet normally is, but you put some buildings on it, and it is at these buildings which you converse with the person you normally hail from orbit. Just give them very small amounts of minerals. Make new life forms inspired by the inhabitants' spaceships that ignores you until you try to shoot one, and then it kills you really fast.

There's another obstacle to these pipe dreams: some older developers had the unfortunate habit of losing the source code during corporate shuffling-around, so even if you get the rights, you might still have to remake the whole game from scratch... which, with a little creative name-changing, is (probably) already legal.

Hide a star where every one of its (many) planets is full of hostile life, dangerous weather, and high temperatures, and also they're all Treasure worlds full of gold. Hide an object - a Treasure Chest - on the surface of the deadliest of these worlds. Build this Treasure Chest into a simple quest involving a race of pirates who, sadly, went extinct.

The PS3 is a really cheap Blu-Ray player that has the added bonus of being able to play PS3 games. Problem is that they're marketing it as a really expensive game console rather than a really cheap Blu-Ray player.

Microsoft and Sony are spending lots of money to try to force the other one out of the market. Whoever lasts longer can then start worrying about turning a profit from their games division. Nintendo, on the other hand, never sells at a loss for more than a few weeks. They might never get lots of market share, but I can't imagine them being forced out of the market. And as long as they have their talented first- and second-party developers, they'll have enough of a fanbase to ensure that they have a market.

Developers are really the most important part of the equation. Every game is a feature, and the machine with the most best features wins. The console that does the best is usually the one with the greatest number of high-profile exclusive titles. High-quality but low-profile exclusives are below that, and then you have higher-quality versions of cross-platform releases. Hardware features fit into the mixture based on how much hype they're getting.

This is where it gets confusing. A hardware manufacturer has to attract many developers in order to guarantee selling a console. But they have to sell their console in order to attract developers - they're both in it for money, and no developer will make a game if it can only sell to people who have Obscurebox 9000s (of which only ten were made). Most developers solve this problem by subsidizing developers who will make exclusive titles for them.




Regarding the last generation. The general consensus among developers is that if they can do it on the Xbox, then they can probably do it on the Gamecube, and they'll have to optimize it or maybe even scale it back for the PS2. The Xbox's edge over the Gamecube is very slight, and the only developers who really take advantage of that extra margin are the ones who wouldn't be making games for systems other than the Xbox anyway.

Joke: you've got a console, but you don't know which one it is. How do you identify it? Well, it's simple. Drop it off a building. If it still works after it lands, it's a Nintendo console. If it leaves a crater, it's a Microsoft console. If it disintegrates in the air, it's a Sony console.

So, uh, how about that Paul Reich III rumor, hmm?

If you could work Schlock Mercenary somewhere into that, you'd gain +5 to Geek Cred.

The Ur-Quan are a species very, very disdainful of menial tasks. Their most hated enemies are used to translate their speech. They look down upon their other slaves. They view the slaves as expendable. So, for their fighters, they make the cheapest ships possible - utter deathtraps - because they care more if a ship is lost than if a slave is lost.

I like the detail. I'm still not sure about the black lines, though. They might be better if they were some sort of differently-colored mechanical component rather than paint or a shadow or whatever that's supposed to be. Also they should follow the curvature of the vessel.

I dunno about real-time, but for open-source TBS, there's Freeciv, which is basically a clone of the Civilization series. People's Tactics isn't open source, but it's still freeware, and it's pretty good.

Yeah, I play Wesnoth.

REVIVING DEAD THREAD



I'm not a huge fan of real-time strategy, primarily because of the "real-time" element. There are too many demands on my attention in games like that, so many that I end up failing to do anything competently. I like to take my time in games when I can. That's not to say I don't enjoy them, I just greatly prefer turn-based strategy.

Man, Advance Wars DS really needs online support. Advance Wars By Web is nice, but it could be so much better.

There was one RTS I came across that I enjoyed the hell out of, though. It was on a console, of all places. Ogre Battle 64. It was very slow-paced for a RTS, and all things considered it was really more of an RPG. But, it had units moving around on a map in something resembling real-time and you could only indirectly control the combat, and I guess that means it counts.